Summari pivots to AI-generated link previews that really click
Reading Time: 2 minutesSummari took a shot at making article summaries on demand a must-have tool for the overloaded reader. But a year later the startup is leaving that model in the dust for a new, and in retrospect way better, use for its summarization service: link previews. And once you give them a shot, you may find them hard to do without.
The original use case had users feed a URL to the service via browser extension, and Summari would generate a summary, naturally, in just a few seconds. Cool, but as they soon found out, it wasn’t enough to make users rely on it.
It makes sense: while it’s nice to have a short version of an article now and then, I can’t say I would pay a buck a month for it. Generally if an article is too long for me to read I skim it or save it for later. No newfangled AI is going to change my hidebound habits.
But Summari pressed on and as it learned more about what its tech would be useful for, it improved the tech itself. What I saw from the company last year was ‘V1 — and we’re probably on V100 now. We own and do everything ourselves, we just have a lot more control over everything, from quality to speed to accuracy.’ Just this week, in fact, a new version of the model with triple the data is coming online and showing further improved results.
Getting to a certain level of quality opens up the possibility of automation, and soon the possibility of automating content summary for websites that publish a lot of content started making more sense than doing it on demand for readers. Of course you still have to find a way to make those summaries useful. (Disclosure: Former TC writer Anthony Ha went to work at Summari investor Eniac a while back. Maybe this was all his idea.)
What the company landed on is link previews. When you have a link, like this one, hovering over it doesn’t usually do anything. There are some plugins that add stuff, and some shopping sites will do a popup, but generally it just changes your arrow to a hand and maybe shows the target URL in the status bar.
What Summari does is empower every link with a super-succinct AI-generated preview. So the link halfway down this post becomes this:
On mobile you would tap a little icon next to the link — not ideal, Shrager admitted, ‘and I’m constantly fighting with my product guy about it.’ But you don’t want to interfere with normal link operation so options are limited.
Here are a couple more examples Summari generated for me in text form (just imagine them in a fancy box like the Xbox one above):
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Ref: techcrunch
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